Week 3, Part 4

In order for my classmates and professors in the Academic Partnership Program to follow the progress of my action research project, I have created a blog. This will allow my fellow colleagues to monitor my progress and make any suggestions or direct any concerns they may have as they follow along with my research. In addition, the group has also created a Facebook page to keep out our entire classmates informed simultaneously. In regards to my subjects in the action research project, such as my LEP students and parents, I plan to keep in communication with them via Edmodo and/or my webpage. Constant communication will occur with LEP students and parents, fellow faculty and staff, and even my classmates via blogging, emails, Facebook, flyers, word of mouth, etc.

LEP students are not taking the new state standardized tests (STAAR) seriously because they do not have parents stressing to them the importance of these tests. In addition, the significant changes with these tests have not been fully explained to their parents due to the language barrier. This causes a strain to the performance of the student because the parents are not able to stress the importance to their child because we as educators have not reached out to them in their language to better explain it to them. With the creation of informationals/workshops/and activities in their language, we will see an improvement, not only on their state tests, but also in their academic grades.

As mentioned in my action research plan, data will be collected via the counselor by obtaining test results from the previous years which will be broken down to several different classifications. In addition, a plan will be created and implemented so that we can have data post the action research project to compare it with. Constant monitoring will be obtained in order to observe anything that might need to be revised within the action research plan.

Concluding the action research project, my site supervisors and I will determine if the constant bilingual involvement affected the state test results of our LEP students and their academic grades. In addition, I will also look into their attendance to see if there were any significant changes to that as well.